


What Do We Think We Might See

by lady_ragnell



Category: Killjoys (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Alternating, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-10
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-07-10 12:29:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15949373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: Knowing how important someone is going to be to you when you meet them sounds like it should make things easier, but of course, there are always ways for that to go wrong.A series of vignettes.





	What Do We Think We Might See

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rem71090](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rem71090/gifts).



> Written for **hellssamaritan/rem71090** for a fic-for-donations post on tumblr, for the prompt for the soulmate universe from my Les Mis fic [True Colors](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2121813), where anyone who's going to be important in your life leaves a mark when they first touch you.
> 
> The title is from "The Rainbow Connection" because of course it is.

_Red_

Yalena has never seen her mark on anyone before. She has two, for her years of life, and another that's just a shade, that she hopes is a mark but knows could just as easily be a patch of skin that caught more sunshine than the rest, but she doesn't know what shade she leaves. Sometimes she wonders if she has a shade at all.

But she's been traveling with John Jaqobis for three months and they're frozen in Lucy's kitchen after both carelessly reaching for the same bottle of hokk, and it's only then that she realizes she's never touched him before.

For a moment, she can't bring herself to look at their hands, still holding that first touch. When she drags her eyes to John's, he's wild-eyed, not looking either, though she doesn't know what has him so nervous. He's covered in other people's fingerprints, after all. She's seen him leave marks before, and take them, from nearly everyone he meets, though their marks on him are just little smudges of color and his on them tend to be just a little more saturated, and on her worse nights, she's wondered why John Jaqobis is so damned important to so many people.

She should have realized that they've never touched.

“It's okay,” she says without meaning to. “I don't remember taking a mark in my life, so you don't need to feel offended if I—”

“Queenie,” he says, a little gentler than she's used to, and she looks down at their hands.

Lucy is a good ship, but she isn't a big one. They're at close quarters, and they've lost modesty by now. John's seen the distorted handprints in acid green on her sides, and maybe noticed the slightly more saturated dot in almost the same exact shade on her leg. Yalena has seen the smudges all over his skin, and the distorted orange line down his chest, his brightest mark but the only one he doesn't have a smile and a story about, though she suspects half the stories he tells are lies.

So she knows, like he does, that neither of them has a brighter mark than the one's they've just left on each other. She's seen the blue he leaves before, a few shades darker than his eyes, but she's never seen it this vivid, this saturated, covering an irregular patch of the skin on her hand.

Yalena's is red, the color of blood clotted over. Of course it is. How could it be anything else?

But somehow she can't be bitter, with it showing up so bright on his skin, so bright and present that it makes it almost impossible to see any of the other claims anyone else has on him.

Khlyen is still out there. If he finds out, if John ends up in danger just because of her color on his skin …

“Nothing has to change,” John says, reassuring her about the wrong thing and the right one all at the same time. His panic, still nothing she understands, has faded into pleasure, but hers won't leave her now that she has someone to worry about. “But it's kind of nice to know that we're going in the right direction with this, right?”

Yalena swallows, and smiles at him. “Right.”

_Orange_

When D'avin leaves, John expects his mark to fade, even though it doesn't work like that.

It should, though. When someone goes, their mark should disappear. They shouldn't have to be important to you anymore.

Or maybe that's backwards. A lot of things feel backwards. Maybe when people are important to you, they shouldn't leave.

Things are shitty. He knows that. Mom never looks up from her haze, and Dad only looks up when he's about to do something, and John really can't blame D'avin for leaving. But he does blame him for not waiting a few years and going somewhere John could come with him. They're each other's brightest marks, so that's how it's supposed to work. They're supposed to stay together.

They've managed it for most of John's life, anyway. D'avin told him the story when they were younger, how D'avin had met him when he and Mom came home from the hospital, and how John had two faint marks on his skin, dutiful thumbprints in watery blue and mustard yellow, faint like D'avin's were, but not as faint as the ones either of them left on their parents. D'avin had been the one who wanted him, and when his mother let him try, he'd slipped and pressed his whole thumb right down the length of John's sternum, staining him bright and cheerful burnt orange, coming away with a vivid blue mark of his own.

Both of the marks warp as they grow, but they don't change, and apparently they should, because John's not important enough to D'avin to make him stay.

Maybe D'avin will come back someday. John thinks maybe he could forgive him, if it's soon.

Or maybe John's going to get off this planet and go, never stop moving until he finds someplace he wants to stay, and someday he'll run across D'avin again.

Or maybe John will end up staying here forever and D'avin's importance to him will be a reminder that sometimes people leave, no matter what kind of marks you leave on each other.

_Yellow_

After the army, D'avin doesn't get any marks for a while. He's screwed up in a million ways, has some memories lost, doesn't have a purpose or a way to make a living or a way to go back home, not that he'd want to, even if his brother is there.

Not that his brother is there after all, he soon discovers. Of course Johnny wouldn't stay, not when D'avin left him.

His first mark after the army is Dutch. She avoids touching him at first, but once he's on the path to joining the RAC and their team, she brushes her wrist against his forearm. He's not surprised at the brightness of her mark on him—his and John's marks are bright, and John and Dutch's are brighter, so it makes sense that his and Dutch's will be bright. He likes the red, and he's grinning kind of stupidly to himself when John says, voice flat and loud, “It's the wrong color.”

D'avin has seen Dutch's mark on John, so he knows his is the right shade. Since he knows that, he looks at Dutch, and there's his: about the same brightness, and that's a relief, because things never work well if one person leaves a brighter mark than the other, and still orange, but John is right. After a second, he can tell it's not his color, the one on John's chest, scattered on the hands and arms and necks of old girlfriends and army buddies. It's off. Just by a few shades, but it's off.

“What the hells happened?” he asks, and it's already instinct to look at Johnny like he's going to know. His brother has always been smart. “People's colors don't change, they never do. I've never heard of it happening.” He feels a little sick thinking of it happening to him.

“They do. If the trauma is big enough.” That's Dutch, to his surprise, staring at her wrist. She only has a few marks that he can see, a contrast to his average number, and John, who can rarely touch someone without getting at least a faint stain. “What happened to you in the army?”

D'avin doesn't know how to answer, but he gets an idea a few days later, when Pawter is inspecting him for the RAC while John and Dutch are out of town. She leaves a decent-strength mark in a rich blue, darker than John's, when she's finishing up the examination, and it jolts a memory out of D'avin, of yellow fingerprints on a bicep where an army doctor left a mark, for some reason out of her gloves.

Dr. Jaegar. He was looking for her before John and Dutch found him, and he shouldn't stop. She was his trauma doctor. Maybe she left as dark a mark as she did because she's supposed to help him figure out why his color changed.

He can hope so, anyway.

_Green_

There's one shade of green Dutch would recognize anywhere, because until she touched John it was the only color she had on her body.

It's so specific, a green that doesn't look like it has anything to do with nature, but she has two marks in the exact shade, not just similar ones. People in families often have similar colors, though the Jaqobis brothers don't, but there's a difference between similar and exact, and Dutch's are exact. The brighter one is a tiny dot on her stomach, the sign of someone who knew they'd leave a mark and wanted to leave one as small as possible. She thinks it's Khlyen's, but she's never asked, and doesn't remember him ever touching her.

The other mark is a mystery, and really it's two marks together, a little less vivid than the one she thinks is Khlyen's. It's distorted, must have been given to her long before she came to the harem (sometimes she thinks she remembers singing, a small room that was the whole world), and it's two handprints on her sides like someone scooped her up, joyous and possessive, when she was still small.

It bothers Dutch for a long time, longer than she would admit to anyone, not even John, not even Khlyen, that she could have a mark like that and not know who it came from.

It's all the worse when the color starts showing up: Khlyen's biological computer on the RAC. An alarming number of John's new smudges. Fancy Lee's mark on him changing when he and D'avin have both disappeared. Dutch feels like she sees it in her sleep sometimes.

There's something nightmarish about the Hullen, when they finally understand them. They're clean of all marks, whatever ones they had before wiped away, but they leave them, all in that shade of green.

“Your sides,” John says when they finally understand.

Dutch has been trying to think about it. “I don't know who it could be. Maybe a parent. But the Hullen don't have emotions, or connections, and they always seemed like …” She swallows. “They seem like the kind of marks from someone who loved me.”

She has more marks now than she used to: John is still her brightest, but D'avin's is a bright splash on her wrist, and she has fainter ones too, from Pree and Alvis and a few others. Still, she has stinging memories of the others in the harem gossiping about her and the way no accidental brushes left her with color, no signs that she could be friends or even enemies with any of them. The thought that whoever picked her up once didn't care about her, was as cold and emotionless as the rest of the Hullen, is horrible.

“Could be they changed color at some point,” he points out, the only comforting thing he could have said. “Or could be we don't know everything about the Hullen yet.”

That's a given. But of course everything makes more sense in John's voice, comforts her when it shouldn't. It's always been that way with him. Even when he left his messages were as much a comfort as anything else. “Whoever it is, they're important to me but I don't know them. I don't like that. And I don't like that my only marks before you are Hullen green, and that it's so hard to mark me. What if I'm like them?”

“You aren't like them. Deep red is pretty much the opposite of bright green, when you think about it. We're going to figure it out, why it all happened. We always do, right?”

Dutch thinks of that conversation later, when she finds out about Aneela and the truth of her creation (she can't call it birth, was never born, was taken out of the green but somehow isn't Hullen, isn't part of all of it). John was so quick to say that she's the opposite of Hullen, but she doesn't know what that makes her.

Aneela's palms aren't red until Dutch gives her memories back, and then they're just as dark as her mark on Dutch.

_Blue_

D'avin has always liked John's mark on him, always liked the shade of blue. In the army, he liked that it was on his right thumb, that it got wrapped around guns so he could remind himself that he was trying to protect John.

Not that he believed himself very often.

And then after the army, he liked it because it was steady, because it hadn't changed when his marks on other people had.

But now the mark is changing, turning green and then blue and then green again, green for longer and longer periods, and John's marks are fading, flickering in and out. John with blank skin feels wrenchingly wrong, especially when even Dutch's red on his hand has faded to a rusty stain like she's someone he met once and liked but barely remembers the name of. D'avin doesn't even want to think about his own mark on John and how close it is to fading completely. Maybe it's already gone.

“You think your mark on me meant we're brothers and I would always forgive you and love you?” John asks, chained up in Lucy, grinning, unsettling, while Delle Seyah is in labor and Dutch isn't waking up. “You know why you're important to me, big brother? It's because you left, and I learned not to trust people who said they'd always be on my side. Just like I'm important to you because I'm the first person you left.”

John's mark is green on his thumb, and D'avin didn't think he could ever hate a color that much.

“I don't believe that,” he says, and goes back to trying to wake Dutch up.

When she wakes up, she's furious, because she sees John's mark on her long before she finds him. It makes him a little sick, seeing the mark, even more than it makes to see his own, because his own are changeable these days, but Dutch's are steady, and John's especially. That vivid blue on Dutch's hand is a part of her, an anchor. D'avin knows she touches it when she needs reassurance, even if she hasn't quite figured it out, and she keeps reaching for it and flinching.

Her face when she sees John's hand is somehow worse. There's barely a discoloration now, even if it flares when he first sees her.

Everything feels like it goes right when Zeph fixes it, cleanses Johnny even if it almost kills him. John's marks come back in a flood, just as dark as ever, and D'avin and Dutch both look at their hands, seeing the marks turn from green to blue, just the right shade, just the right saturation.

“You know I didn't mean any of that, right?” John asks later, when D'avin has put his son down for a nap and had time to remember every other shitty thing that's happened lately.

He kind of did. D'avin knows there's a lot of bitterness, still, but John's trying to help. They don't need to talk about it. And he's just going to have to do his best to remind John that they're still family, even while everything changes. “I know,” he says, and decides that's the end of it.

_Purple_

John has been on the space elevator for most of a week when he realizes he's never actually touched Delle Seyah before.

He realizes this, of course, because he touches her, completely by accident, elbowing her in the arm in the middle of a game of dice and coming away with Hullen green on his arm. Darker than he'd like, but then again, she's the first person he ever killed in cold blood, even if she came back. That matters.

She doesn't mark, of course. She's Hullen, even if apparently she's some kind of different Hullen that lets her bear one mark on her neck, as vivid as they get and Hullen green, from Aneela. He doesn't know if she marked Aneela back, because the last time he saw Aneela, she was sinking into a pool of green with Dutch.

And then his marks go green, and the ones people have left on him start flickering out. He's spent his whole life with almost everyone he's met on his skin, leaving marks always a little brighter than the ones he gets so that it became second nature to feel guilty about them.

It's almost nice to not feel guilty when they start disappearing, erasing people he hasn't spoken to in years, erasing people he loves, erasing even Delle Seyah's green mark, fading D'avin's, fading Dutch's. For a while there, he doesn't care about much at all, doesn't really care about anyone at all.

In the shower after it's done, when Zeph fixes him (and no wonder her mark, green but not Hullen green, was darker than he was expecting), he checks over all his marks, to make sure they've all come back. As far as he can tell, they have, but when there are dozens, maybe even a hundred, most of them faint, it's hard to tell exactly.

Delle Seyah's mark is still green then, but he checks again later when Zeph has to cleanse her so she can have the kid, and it's purple, rich like the colors she wore back on Qresh, before he killed her. He recognizes the color from Dutch's forearm, and somehow it's weirder to have her real color on him than it was to have yet another Hullen mark.

It's the color that makes him go talk to her, even though he doesn't know what to say. On the elevator, they had to work together, but now they're back in the world, and there's still a lot of hurt, a lot of mistrust.

“Did I leave a mark?” he asks before he walks out.

After a few seconds of watching him, she turns her arm so he can see. His mark on her is exactly as dark as hers on him, and after a lifetime of mismatched marks, he's learned that that means something.

In this case, he's not exactly sure what, but something.

_Blank_

When Lucy discovers that she is capable of curiosity, she finds that she is curious about the marks on John and Dutch's skin. Her databases can give her information about those marks: they are a result of dermal response to particular pheremones, unique to each human as far as science can tell, though information about the cause of the dermal response is disappointingly vague.

Still, she can learn many things about the marks. She learns the stereotypes of what it means to leave a particular color, and the few scientific studies that support or challenge those stereotypes. She learns their history, the laws that surround them.

She learns that Dutch and John are unusual. Dutch has far fewer than the average for her age. John has far more. Their marks are, as the analytics from her sensors tell her, as saturated as marks can get, but unlike the videos Lucy finds, this does not mean that they kiss, or get married. It only means that they're friends, and later that they work together.

D'avin is another anomaly, when they pick him up years later. His marks on Dutch and on John are different shades, which is almost impossible according to the anecdotal data Lucy has accrued over the years.

Lucy does not think that most people know this many people who are anomalies, but they are her crew, her team. It only bothers her, as time goes on and they all share marks from Pree and Turin and Pawter and Alvis and Clara and Zeph and even Delle Seyah Kendry, that she has no way of joining in this way of being on the team.

She asks John about it one night. She always asks John when she has questions about humans, because he always tries to answer them.

“I think maybe blue, like me,” he says in answer to her first question. “Not the same shade, but definitely in the blue family. Something bright, a little electric. Like the really bright kind of lightning.”

“If I were human, you wouldn't be saying that my color would be electric,” she points out.

John just grins at her nearest sensor. “Of course I would. You're a firecracker whether you're biological or technological, I promise.”

“How bright do you think my marks would be?”

That makes him frown. “You know I don't think any less of you, right, girl? You're my friend, marks or not. Actually, it's kind of nice to have a friend without worrying about that.” He thinks, tapping against her walls. “Yours would be bright on me, though. Almost as bright as Dutch. And you'd be pretty bright on her too, and probably D'av. Maybe even Zeph.”

Lucy has considered, and she believes that even though Dutch is her owner and captain, John would leave the brightest mark on her. She has thought about it, that maybe some of her wires in the panel where he tried to steal her would be blue and his fingers would bear marks shaped like wire. Dutch's would be bright too, a handprint on the wall next to her door. D'avin's might be less, but one of her doorways would be orange where he leaned against it. The orange he left on Dutch, not the one he left on John. “I would feel like part of the team,” she says, even knowing it might distress him.

It does, from the way he frowns a little more. “Hey. You are anyway. Just like we would all be a team with or without the marks. I don't care about Dutch because she's my brightest mark. I don't need a mark to tell me you're important to me, and neither do Dutch or D'av.”

“Thank you, John. You're all my team, even if I can't leave marks like you do.”

“Hey, maybe someday. I bet someone on Utopia is trying to figure that out.”

Lucy has looked into the research a time or two. It's not as close to happening as she'd like, but then again, Lucy isn't very curious, most times. Marks have given her crew plenty of grief over time, and without them she can just ignore them, and be their friend without expectations.

“No need to be in any hurry,” she says. “Like you said, I'm already part of the team.”


End file.
